With an explosive growth in utilization of communication devices, mobile telecommunications carriers are seeing an exponential increase in network traffic. To meet the demands of higher traffic and/or improve the end user experience, conventional systems deploy metro cells (e.g., small cells) that improve network coverage and capacity by offloading mobile traffic between overlapping cells.
Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) comprise different types of cells (e.g., metro cells, macro cells, femtocells etc.) having overlapped coverage areas. Size information associated with the different types of cells is extracted by a serving access point from history information stored within a user equipment (UE). The history information comprises information about cells that have previously served the UE and includes size information indicative of a size of a coverage area of the cell. Moreover, the history information is transferred from the UE to the serving access point within a handover request message. On receiving the handover request message, the serving access point extracts the size information and sorts the information based on reports/history information received from multiple UEs leading to increased processing and complexity, and reduced accuracy.